Dan Wright

It is very frustrating when there is a conference you want to attend and you can't get any information about it. It is even more frustrating when you are a conference organizer receiving complaints about no news despite all your efforts to keep people informed. Here is a guide to finding out what's going on inside YAPC.

Starting with the official channels:

The first and foremost way to find out what's happening with YAPC is yapcna.org. The home page of the conference site contains a news banner that will take you to recent announcements. It also has a list of links to places you might want to subscribe to receive information.

But wait, there's more...

YAPC::NA has an announcement e-mail list. This is a very low traffic list, as posts to this list are only allowed from the organizers. If you are signing up for YAPC for the first time, you'll receive an auto-subscription notice with a one-click opt-out opportunity. We strongly recommend you do not opt-out.

You may also want to keep an eye on The Perl Foundation blog. We do post information about YAPC::NA to TPF's blog, though usually only the most important news is posted there.

The Perl Foundation also has both Facebook and Twitter channels. If you frequently use either of those social media, you should consider subscribing yourself to The Perl Foundation to receive updates.

There are also less official channels. Here's an incomplete list of outlets that were used by organizers past to distribute news about YAPC. These should be considered unreliable ways of getting information about YAPC.

The YAPC discussion e-mail list held dual roles for several years as both an official announcement list and a forum for attendees to discuss and self-organize activities. But now, the list serves only as a forum for discussion. This was done in response to requests to get e-mail updates about the conference without needing to receive the higher volume discussions that sometimes follow.

There is also a #yapc channel on irc.perl.org. There are often organizers in the channel that can either answer questions for you, or point you at the right place to get answers. Other times, the channel is used for general discussion. Please note that the channel has its own Standards of Conduct policy maintained by the IRC server admins, which is different from the YAPC SOC.

There is a YAPC blog site that was used for a couple years. But since ACT (the conference website) also has its own built in blog, it was confusing to have two different news blogs for the same event. As a result, this is being deprecated in favor of the news entries on the YAPC::NA home page. Some entries about Salt Lake exist, but you shouldn't count on this as a reliable way to find out what's happening.

The is also a @yapcna twitter feed that you can subscribe to. However, this mostly just re-tweets the information being sent out by @perlfoundation.

Likewise, there is a yapcna facebook page. But, it was rarely used for anything. We are in the process of merging it in with the Perl Foundation page. So, you can expect this to go away soon.

There may be other channels that I don't even know about. YAPC has a rich history of reinventing itself. Sometimes this can be a strength. But when it comes to communications, it is usually a weakness. We're putting in a lot of effort to correct that now. By both consolidating communications channels as well as formalizing our communications process, we hope to build a more consistent communications experience going forward. Because as much as you hate it when you can't find out about Perl events, we hate it even more. :-)